Sylvia Plath was an American poet, novelist, and short story writer. She is credited with advancing the genre of confessional poetry and is best known for two of her published collections, The Colossus and Other Poems (1960) and Ariel (1965), as well as The Bell Jar, a semi-autobiographical novel published shortly before her suicide in 1963. The Collected Poems was published in 1981, which included previously unpublished works. For this collection Plath was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 1982, making her the fourth to receive this honour posthumously.
Margaret Eleanor Atwood is a Canadian poet, novelist, literary critic, essayist, teacher, environmental activist, and inventor. Since 1961, she has published eighteen books of poetry, eighteen novels, eleven books of non-fiction, nine collections of short fiction, eight children's books, two graphic novels, and a number of small press editions of both poetry and fiction. Atwood has won numerous awards and honors for her writing, including two Booker Prizes, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the Governor General's Award, the Franz Kafka Prize, Princess of Asturias Awards, and the National Book Critics and PEN Center USA Lifetime Achievement Awards. A number of her works have been adapted for film and television.
Lizzie Andrew Borden was an American woman who was tried and acquitted of the August 4, 1892, axe murders of her father and stepmother in Fall River, Massachusetts. No one else was charged in the murders, and despite ostracism from other residents, Borden spent the remainder of her life in Fall River. She died of pneumonia at age 66, just days before the death of her older sister, Emma.
Kristen Britain is an American author. She wrote Green Rider, First Rider's Call, The High King's Tomb, Blackveil, and Mirror Sight. The sixth book in the Green Rider series, Firebrand, was released February 28, 2017. The seventh book "Winterlight" was released September 2021.
Marilyn Hacker is an American poet, translator and critic. She is Professor of English emerita at the City College of New York.
Julia Alvarez is an American New Formalist poet, novelist, and essayist. She rose to prominence with the novels How the García Girls Lost Their Accents (1991), In the Time of the Butterflies (1994), and Yo! (1997). Her publications as a poet include Homecoming (1984) and The Woman I Kept to Myself (2004), and as an essayist the autobiographical compilation Something to Declare (1998). Many literary critics regard her to be one of the most significant Latina writers and she has achieved critical and commercial success on an international scale.
Anita Desai FRSL, born Anita Mazumdar, is an Indian novelist and the Emerita John E. Burchard Professor of Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. As a writer she has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times. She received a Sahitya Akademi Award in 1978 for her novel Fire on the Mountain, from the Sahitya Akademi, India's National Academy of Letters. She won the British Guardian Prize for The Village by the Sea (1983). Her other works include The Peacock, Voices in the City, Fire on the Mountain and an anthology of short stories, Games at Twilight. She is on the advisory board of the Lalit Kala Akademi and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, London.
Patricia Nead Elrod is an American novelist specializing in urban fantasy. She has written in the mystery, romance, paranormal, and historical genres with at least one foray into comedic fantasy. Elrod is also an editor, having worked on several collections for Ace Science Fiction, DAW, Benbella Books, and St. Martin's Griffin. She self-published a signed, limited edition novel under her own imprint, Vampwriter Books.
Kimiko Hahn is an American poet and distinguished professor in the MFA program of Queens College, CUNY. Her works frequently deal with the reinvention of poetic forms and the intersecting of conflicting identities.
Amelia Holt Atwater-Rhodes, known professionally as Amelia Atwater-Rhodes, is an American author of fantasy and young adult literature and a Language Arts/Literature teacher at Learning Prep School in West Newton, MA.
Ágota Kristóf was a Hungarian writer who lived in Switzerland and wrote in French. Kristof received the European prize for French literature for The Notebook (1986). She won the 2001 Gottfried Keller Award in Switzerland and the Austrian State Prize for European Literature in 2008.
Mary Borden was an American-British novelist and poet whose work drew on her experiences as a war nurse. She was the second of the three children of William Borden, who had made a fortune in Colorado silver mining in the late 1870s.
Julie Kenner is a USA Today bestselling American author of romance and fantasy novels. She also writes with the pen names J.K. Beck and J. Kenner. In 2014, she received the Romance Writers of America RITA Award as J. Kenner for Best Erotic Romance for Claim Me.
Linda Lael Miller, is a best-selling American author of more than 100 contemporary and historical romance novels. She has also written under the pen name Lael St. James.
Eloisa James is the pen name of Mary Bly. She is a tenured Shakespeare professor at Fordham University who also writes best-selling Regency and Georgian romance novels under her pen name. Her novels are published in 30 countries and have sold approximately 7 million copies worldwide. She also wrote a bestselling memoir about the year her family spent in France, Paris in Love.
Carol Muske-Dukes is an American poet, novelist, essayist, critic, and professor, and the former poet laureate of California (2008–2011). Her most recent book of poetry, Sparrow, chronicling the love and loss of Muske-Dukes’ late husband, actor David Dukes, was a National Book Award finalist.
Yiyun Li is a Chinese-born writer and professor in the United States. Her short stories and novels have won several awards, including the PEN/Hemingway Award and Guardian First Book Award for A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, and the 2020 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award for Where Reasons End. She is an editor of the Brooklyn-based literary magazine A Public Space.
Emily Ballou is an Australian-American poet, novelist and screenwriter. Her poetry collection The Darwin Poems, a verse portrait of Charles Darwin, was published by University of Western Australia Press in 2009. It was written as part of an Australia Council for the Arts residency at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in County Monaghan, Ireland.
Melanie Benjamin is the pen name of American writer Melanie Hauser.
Bridget G. MacCarthy was an Irish academic and writer. She has been described as one of the most important female cultural and literary historians.
